3d Screencasting: Episode I – It Ain’t Your Daddy’s Screencasting

How hard is it to pay attention to the typical screencast? How quickly does your mind begin to wander? At what point do you give up and open a new browser tab or just turn the video off completely?

To date, screencasting has been very utilitarian in practice and application. Cinematography,the art and craft of visual storytelling, is largely eschewed in favor of faithful description. The result is, all too often, a structureless, 2d, static point-of-view video that fails to emotionally connect and provides little to no visual stimulation. It’s a recipe for boredom. We need to change this stale, tired and lazy approach to screencasting and we need to change it now!

What if we could give our screencasts a sense of depth, bring windows, panels and other UI elements to life in a 3d like environment? We can and should give the screen a sense of energy and excitement for our viewers. In fact, it’s imperative for screencasts to visually stimulate the brains of the people watching them. Today, more than ever, with all the distractions and opportunities that exist on the Internet you must give people a reason to keep on watching.

If you’re interested in learning how to shake things up with crazy cool 3d screencasting techniques stay tuned for the next six screencasting episodes on my blog. In part one, Snagit Product Manager Tiffany Wood demonstrates how to use Snagit 10 to grab the transparent Aero windows we’ll use to begin creating 3d objects. Hold on to your hats screencasting nerds–we’re going to bring the fun. ;-)

If you’d like to use the assets in this tutorial and view a completed After Effects sample project you can download the files here.

3d Screencasting Episodes

1. Episode I – It Ain’t Your Daddy’s Screencasting
2. Episode II – Rotoscope Our Problems Away
3. Episode III – Building a Screenshot / Screen Video Sandwich
4. Episode IV – The Magic of Inverted Masks
5. Episode V – Killer Animated Windows
6. Episode VI – Ultra Cool Shadows & Motion Blur

Adobe After Effects: 3d Spotlights

One of the more frequent questions I’ve gotten as the result of the Screencasting as Art project is “how do you pull off those lighting effects.” It’s a valid question and one I wanted to do justice by. So here’s the latest cinematic screencast detailing how to create and manipulate 3d lights in Adobe After Effects. Along the way you’ll learn how to:

• Configure your After Effects workspace to handle working with elements in 3d space.
• Manipulate the x, y, and z position of your lights.
• Adjust cone angle, cone feather, light intensity and light color.
• Animate the position and light properties.

The video runs 7:05 – feedback welcome.

Screencasting notes:

In this video, I again focused on narrative structure, pacing and humanizing the videos, but I paid special attention to making the production value of the talking head footage much higher. I once again relied on my trusty Flip Mino HD, but decided to try and frame things up a bit better and feed the Flip some light (the Flip really struggles in low lighting conditions). So after convincing Santa Claus (my wife Nancy) that I needed a soft box or two, I set up in front of a bare section of wall in my living room and filmed a couple of talking head segments off the cuff. They turned out well and, much to Nancy’s chagrin, have led me to set up shop in the living room permanently. ;-)

Flash Player Games – Is It All About the Polygons?

Raph Koster sees the Flash Platform as the potential future of gaming:

John Grden and some of the other 3d elites in the Flash world don’t feel Flash 3d is good enough.

Is either party correct? Is the answer, almost? Or, does it lie to some other web rendering engine to wrest yet another Silmaril from the clutches of old media? It’s enough to make me wonder if the Mozilla cats won’t get jealous and make 3d gaming a part of the html 5.1 spec( three cheers for FOSS and yet another browser land grab in the Flash world). ;-)